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"Intellectual property" is at best marketing-speak, of doubtful legal meaning. Microsoft is now forced to use "IP" at every turn for reasons that are hopefully obvious.

Cheers to that, I hope this registers with people. IP is an empty term and saves them from the legal ramifications of actually claiming patent infringement or anything else concrete.

Love the lesson on what language you're allowed to use from GNU, re: IP.

But forgive me for taking what they say with a healthy load of salt when I see

""Digital Rights Management"
...
Good alternatives include "Digital Restrictions Management", "Digital Restrictions Malware", and "handcuffware"."

Love the lesson on what language you're allowed to use from GNU, re: IP.

I'm afraid I missed the part where anyone needs to ask their permission on how to use language. Any pointers?

I apologize for this post. I misused a quote. I will be more careful in the future about using exerpted quotes.

Edited 2006-11-18 02:03

Therefore, Bill Gates thinks that Microsoft and its business is sabotage.

Well, if you replace Bill Gates with RMS, than yeah, you got it right That's an RMS quote (back from 1986 actually). Yes, RMS considers proprietary software sabotage. I know these are strong words, but if you consider it in a proper context, you can understand his point (and I think you do, because regarding software as a form of knowledge is essential to reach that conclusion - sharing knowledge = good for society, holding back knowledge = not very good, preventing others from sharing knowledge = bad for society).

Whether one likes RMS or not, s/he has to admit that he is consistent in his views

Edited 2006-11-18 01:56

Yikes--my post was nothing but brain-damage. Thanks for calling me on it quickly!

Hey, no prob, you simply misread what I wrote, we all make these mistakes, I don't blame you for that (and my english is not perfect either...) I knew were honest, that's what matters

Not true.

RMS has never had issues around charging for software, according to Free As In Freedom. He has always had issues about proprietary software, but that has nothing to do with charging for software.

The GPL is very old by now and has _always_ allowed for commercial distribution. So it is not something new for RMS to accept commercial distribution.

I have never heard or read RMS say anything about password-protecting personal user accounts. Au contraire! At the very least point to a specific place. Right now you are just using the SCO/Caldera tactic.

Read this link:
http://www.gnu.org.in/taxonomy/term/5

If you still think stallman is happy with commercial distributions then i would just shut up and know you are a dishonest person. At least don't be an RMS apologist. Shame on you if you are one.

[Section: Audience question on the goals of the GPL]

Audience member: In this new World, and you're talking about GPL going over to the next version, how do you see proprietary software businesses making a profit?

[54:00]

Richard Stallman: That's unethical, they shouldn't be making any money. I hope to see all proprietary software wiped out. That's what I aim for. That would be a World in which our freedom is respected. A proprietary program is a program that is not free. That is to say, a program which does respect the user's essential rights. That's evil. A proprietary program is part of a predatory scheme where people who don't value their freedom are drawn into giving it up in order to gain some kind of practical convenience. And then once they're there, it's harder and harder to get out. Our goal is to rescue people from this.

Hey, you're misquoting him.

He clearly says that proprietary software businesses shouldn't make any money.

Making money on the GPL is however quite fine with RMS. He wants people to make money on GPL. He also wants to get rid of all proprietary software. That's his goal, and let it be. We don't have to share it, do we?

RMS is happy about commercial distributions - but he hates proprietary distributions.

Remember: Commercial != Proprietary.

The GP did incorrectly RMS interchang "commercial" with "proprietary". Nevertheless, the RMS quote does illustrate what a fantatical, irrational koo-koo RMS is. I'm sorry, but I don't consider "proprietary" software to be one of the great "evils" of humanity. Nor do I consider selling such to be an "crime against humanity". No rational person would.

Regarding "evil" business models, how about the OSS model itself, which smacks of surfdom?
Under RMS' model, rich execs (e.g. Red Hat, IBM execs) get fat off the free labor of others (the unpaid OSS devs) that have been convinced by RMS that they're fighting a moral crusade against the wickedness of proprietary software. The devs get to feel "good" about doing the "right" thing for free while IBM and Red Hat laugh all the way to the bank. Remember, RMS spent years living for free at MIT, so he had no notion of having to actually make a living and so could theorize about how software should be developed for free.

It was ERS and others, looking to find an actual business model for GPL, that added the provision, "Develop software for free, but be sure to make it difficult to use so you can charge for support!!" which is Red Hat and IBM's model.

I don't consider GPL "evil" (like more extremist GPL advocates do consider proprietary software to be). But it is a model that encourages making difficult to use software (so that support is *required*), on the backs of unpaid labor force. It's a model where "support" is worth paying for but the software itself is not. Meaning that support is valued more than software, which ultimately means that consultants are valued more than programmers. This is backwards as far as I can see.

I don't understand why you call him a hypocrate. Your RMS quote is perfectly in line with what I said earlier - if anything, he is consistent in his ideals.

The mistake you make - I think - is that you mix up two statements. In your quote, RMS talks about making money selling proprietary software, which he thinks is unethical. He didn't say making money on free software is wrong!

If you still think stallman is happy with commercial distributions then i would just shut up and know you are a dishonest person. At least don't be an RMS apologist. Shame on you if you are one.


So, you didn't prove anything - RMS has his beliefs, and he is quite consistent in pursuing his ideals. Your quote doesn't support your argument at all - he is talking about making money selling proprietary software, and not about commercial free software distributions. Having a cursory knowledge of his views, I think he won't find any problems with commercial distroes - he considers prop. soft. wrong because "It is an activity that benefits the person that does it at the cost of impoverishing all of society." OTOH, when RH makes money on selling support contracts for his enterprise linux offerings, it uses parts of that money to fuel development of Free software. In other words, it uses a fairly large portion of its profits in a way that benefits the society (and that's why I mentioned Trolltech as well), not just those who payed for their distribution.

There, there. Stallman is against the proprietary model, not against making money on software in general. "They" is used for "proprietary software businesses" here. Nothing, from his POV, should prevent you from creating a GPL program and selling it. But you'll then have to comply with the GPL and provide the sources, therefore the initial sale is your only "guaranteed" sale (provided there's a customer), and you have to set the maximum price the market will bear. In other words, you charge money for performing the work to create the software, not for each license issued.

Now, you may see this model as unsustainable for shrinkwrapped software, but this is only a small part of commercial software world. There's a whole lot of custom software created, where this model fits perfectly. Moreover, it can be even more profitable: there is a lot of ready free GPL libraries and apps available for almost every possible task you can imagine, so you can cut your costs by not having to wirite everything from scratch or buy costly proprietary components.

Hope this helps.

TemCat:

Back your "More Profitable" claims. How exactly do you think without properietary software, will there be innovation in software industry?

GPL'ed software hasn't done anything to that effect so far. In fact BSD still has done it with OS X. GPL on the other hand is a pain to commercialize. Think why RedHat people were shittin their pants when Oracle announced it will support RHEL.

This is the pitfalls of GPL.

Linux is being used as the slut of hardware vendors right now.

Do you think money from support will be enough to invest hugely in software research and development?

Do you think IBM or SUN would care for software innovation if they have to give it for free and they don't have hardware innovation to sell?

Edited 2006-11-18 10:03

I think Novell's biggest mistake was to handle over the Ximian guys their desktop strategy, especially since what made SuSE a successful distro was their excellent KDE support. I wonder how deeply entrenched Mono technology has become in SuSE/OpenSuSE (does YAST depend on it now?). Quite frankly, I don't trust Miguel & Co. He was saying for years that Mono has no patent problems, then immediately after the deal, he said that finally, Mono is safe. Than he reaffirmed that it has no patent issues again. WTF?

Would have modded you up further if I could. Ximian was bought for their technology, Suse was bought for their user base, and Novell thought the two were interchangeable.

It's sad that Novell allowed the strife between the outspokenly anti-KDE primates and the Susers to create a division, particularly since the Suse side was the one actually providing revenue. To their credit, ever since the gNovell announcement and the resulting acrimony, they did a respectable job of backtracking and continuing with strong support for KDE alongside development of Gnome.

Best of all, there's a definite benefit to KDE on the opensuse side, since the devs are starting to eliminate the mono dependencies on things like zmd. Despite the political BS within Novell, openSuse is still one of the best KDE distros, and they are still one of the biggest supporters of KDE.

I can understand some of the outrage from the community at Novell regarding the MS agreemenet, but I hope it doesn't spill over to openSuse. Most of the devs there are not involved and are just trying to do the best they can.

"He is so obsessed with mono, that in early 2002 he made various public claims about GNOME moving fully to mono technology, while there wasn't any agreement in the community of doing so (google gnome mono for articles like this: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/02/01/gnome_to_be_based/ )."

The whole register interview is a joke, and is totally biased (as the register tends to be). If you take messages from Miguel from Mailing lists, you will see if never said that. For example, you can read his email following the interview you are talking about:

http://www.linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2002-02-06-011-20-OP...

For the lazy, the first part of the email is


* First, the Facts

GNOME is not adopting Mono or .NET as an implementation
technology. The headline from the Register is misleading,
for a number of reasons:

* The headline does not reflect any statements I
made on the interview (if you read the interview
you will notice this).

* The only future plans that have been approved by the
GNOME team (which has 11 voting members on its
board) are found here:

http://developer.gnome.org/dotplan/

* I am not the GNOME foundation or control GNOME like
Linus controls his kernel, I am just its founder and
a contributor.

* GNOME is not built by an individual, its built by
a team of roughly 500 contributors in many areas.

* Decisions in the GNOME world are done by active
contributors and module maintainers. I have given
my maintainership status on every module I
maintained to other members of the GNOME team as
I got more involved with Ximian and later on with
Mono.

So effectively I have no "maintainer" control.

De Icaza has always been consistent in his views concerning software development. You may not agree with it, and I have a hard time to believe that GPL java does not change anything for mono, but what you are saying about mono does not seem to be based on informations to be trusted (the register).

* concerning patents, fedora incorporated mono a few months ago (this was thanks to OIN).
* concerning patents, miguel just said according to him, mono does not infringe any patent
* the new agreement between MS and novell DO concern mono, but also open office, samba, etc... This does not mean they need to be protected from patent

Concerning this last point, that's actually the point of the whole debate on this agreement (novell and MS): it tends to imply that open source software infringe on patents. see for example the annoucement of samba team: Using patents as competitive tools in the free software world is not acceptable. Novell, as a participant in numerous debates, discussions and conferences on the topic knew this to be the case. We call upon Novell to work with the Software Freedom Law Center to undo the patent agreement and acknowledge its obligations as a beneficiary of the Free Software community (http://news.samba.org/announcements/team_to_novell/)

Edited 2006-11-18 08:59

I don't consider the register to be a good source of information, but they are quoting Miguel here:

"I'd like to see Gnome applications written in .NET in version 4.0 - no, version 3.0. But Gnome 4.0 should be based on .NET," he told us. "

Note that he wrote his clarifications after Havoc's letter. My post might have been a little bit provocative (and if you check my posting history, I don't easily engage in such harsh, and some would claim personal attacks on someone) - but I see something similar happening now:

1) Novell announces the deal, and at the same time, he endorses the deal on his blog (basically using the same corporate speech Novell did in the official announcment). http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2006/Nov-02.html

2) FOSS community up in arms, because from day 0, it was absolutely obvious why the whole deal is against the spirit of the GPL as well as against the principles held by the community (see Samba letter).

3) Novell responds in a FAQ - and Miguel posts on his blog his own FAQ, basically saying exactly the same things. In other words, sidestepping the most important issues raised by the community.

4). Novell's/Miguel's answers doesn't fly well. The results: now Miguel says that there are problems with the deal, it needs clarification, etc. Essentially he backpedaled from his not so old claims (that's what reminded me of the reg-HP-Mig story).

It is still not clear what his position is regarding this issue - and that is what bothers me. What does it mean that the deal needs clarification? What is there to clarify, really? I'm speaking specifically about the patent covenant - because I don't have problems with technical cooperation (that's not the problem of FSF, Samba, etc. either). There is nothing to clarify in this deal - the covenant part should be simply dropped, because it lends legitimacy to the claim that linux has IP issues, and it blatantly violates the spirit of the GPL (if not its letter). This was clear from the very beginning - but I can accept an explanation that he didn't think about it then (even though he knew about the deal for at least a week before it was announced). However, immediately after the announcement went public, the problems were explained in unambiguous terms by many important figures of the FOSS movement... and yet, he defended it using the same terms and explanations as Novell. Now that it seems that this doesn't work, he suddenly realizes that there might be a problem?

To put it bluntly: my problem with Miguel is that I don't think he is being honest here. For days he kept saying basically the same thing as Novell, then when the outrage wouldn't subside, he began talking about the need for clarification, which means what exactly?

Well, first, he obviously cannot speak freely on this issue. I believe him when he says he did not know about the deal before it was made; I don't think it made him really happy, because it is kind of an endorsment of software patent, which the vast majority of propononets of open source (Miguel is one of them; again, you may not agree with him, be he contributed or funded core software for gnome) are against.

Also, he may not be clear in his blog, but mabe this is simply because he is not clear himself on the issue. The thing is really hot, so I think one should wait before drawing conclusions.

Before the deal, I think Miguel was consistent with his saying about patent; do not forget that the is not a lawyer, and that he never claimed that he was 100 % sure about this.

From my various reading of blogs or emails from various figures of open source software, I tend to think that you cannot avoid infringing patent anyway for anything non trivial, because almost everything is patented. One of the goal of OIN (which Novel is a member of) is to have something you could compare to nuclear weapons: using it would mean it has failed, and it is there to ensure a kind of mutual destruction in the case someone want to start the war on this.

Note also that Ballmer has been saying this whole "we believe linux infringe some of our software" crap for many years; do you think that if it were true, they would not have been going to court ?

Also, he may not be clear in his blog, but mabe this is simply because he is not clear himself on the issue.

Well, you provide sound arguments in his defense. He might be a simple bloke who doesn't know what he is doing (or saying). In his blog, he likens the current deal to the SUN-MS agreement, claiming that it is similar. I don't know how to relate to this argument - I saw this before on ./ and elsewhere. Does he truly believe this? There are huge differences in both the circumstances (Sun was suing MS, their agreement was basically a standstill) and its impact and scope (the agreement covered software developed by the respective companies, while the Novell-MS deal covers software that is NOT developed by Novell, but the free software community). So, I just don't know where this guy stands - and the ambiguity of this behaviour doesn't help clarify it.

The thing is really hot, so I think one should wait before drawing conclusions.

Well, you might be right - I'm really curious how he would react now that the problems with the deal are clear as daylight. I would expect him to denounce the whole patent FUD, covenant included, but quite frankly, I don't believe he will do that. I understand that he is not entirely free to express his opinion, because he is employed by Novell, but he didn't have to endorse the deal the way he did in the first days... at least I don't think Novell threatened to fire him or something unless he recirculates the company's official stance. And what if they threatened him btw? It is not that a brilliant programmer like him would have any difficulty in finding a new job... Anyway, we will see...

From my various reading of blogs or emails from various figures of open source software, I tend to think that you cannot avoid infringing patent anyway for anything non trivial, because almost everything is patented.

That is true, unfortunately. Hopefully the EU at least stays patent free, but AFAIK the EC is pro-patent, while the parliament is anti-patent. And since the power of the EP is relatively weak, if the EC really wants to push patents through, they will succeed. Hopefully, this whole incident (and we are just at the beginning!) will serve as a warning for the EU.

"he's supposed to be visionary?"

That is a known misconception IMHO.

Can someone name a really kick ass innovative product from the so called GPL spirited guys?

The whole unix started as an open source kind of thing in the 70ies (scene which Stallman is from, as other people); when writing GPL, stallman wanted to insure that code source could be shared, and that the ones who use the software could not close it again.

Example of GPL software which are innovative: CVS, rsync, emacs to name a few. Office is hardly an innovative software; to point outlook as an example for anything related to software is a funny joke.

Example of innovation can be found in open source, GPL and closed source software. I am not sure it can be found in MS, though.

Wow what innovation rsync, CVS, emacs:) That just made me smile. Thanks for proving my point.

And if you don't think Outlook is a kick ass product then tell me an equivalent that can do the job as well?

kick ass product != innovation

Depends what you call Innovation:

Debuggers have been around nearly as long as programmers have stoped to write their code by pinching little holes in cards. What is really innovative of SoftIce? Has it *actual* features other Debuggers don't have? Has it pulled this features out of thin air or "innovated" in small, progressive steps, starting from what was already there in the products of competitors?

Oracles databases scale (argueably) better for *really* large applications compared to mysql / pgsql. Given what they charge for it (exclude the express edition here), it better should. But what features has oracle, that other databases in principle do not have? Rollback tables? Flashback queries? Hardly unique or "gosh, how is it nobody else has thought of this"-innovative features. You *may* have a point wrt to the quality of their database product (again, from my experience, exclude the express edition here), but this is not in the first place a question of inovation, but more of commitment and experience.

And don't get me started on the innovations in MS Office Suit (*cough* Word Perfect *cough*).

Bottom line:

It's easy to inflate the price of your products, when all your competitors use the same buisness model, since they will end up with compareable ground costs (see the outsourcing debate).

Leaving Xerox work on GUI's and fundamental works on theoretical things like algorithms aside, I can hardly see true innovation in the computr areas in the moment.

Yust from the top of my head,and applying your standards of innovation:

- The idea of a Live CD a la Knoppix was innovative when it came round

- It also pays to have a look at some of the Extensions for Firefox / Thunderbird / et. al. Some truly unique ideas are realized there


Perhaps others can come up with more

EDIT: Just realized, that I have used Mozillas Firefox to prove my GPL point. Shouldn't have done so :-)

Edited 2006-11-18 10:42

Can someone name a really kick ass innovative product from the so called GPL spirited guys?

*LOL*
How about the GPL itself, to start with. Or do you believe it's a copy of the MS EULA?

Most of the software you list started as a cheap copy. Calling e. g. MS Office a kick-ass innovative product proves only one point: that you have a very limited horizon when it comes to software ..